Transferring Data to Wisdom in Project Management: Project Management Office

Introduction

Present day, the word “project” is extensively used and project management becomes a universal discipline which can be used in almost all areas of business and industry. The field of project management continues to grow, and there is no evidence to suggest that it will reduce or become less complex (Lientz & Rea, 2002; Krahn, 2005). Management literature, both the popular and scientific, has been paying attention to knowledge and knowledge management for a number of years. Although organizations and their managers realize that knowledge is important it is not always easy to find a starting point for managing knowledge in an organization.

In this chapter, basic introduction about project management is given, together with the historical development of it, and the importance of project management for the development of today's business is emphasized. Also, knowledge management is discussed as a major challenge of today. Organizational unit which can help in knowledge transfer between projects, Project Management Office (PMO), is mentioned, as well as various software tools which can be used to manage projects.

The objective of this chapter is to provide the reader with basic information about project management, knowledge management within projects, as well as about PMO as a key knowledge broker between the project and organization. Software tools used for project management can play an important role in knowledge transfer, so most prominent software tools are listed and discussed. Although software tools for project management provide an array of outstanding possibilities and enable users with loads of data, it is questionable whether it is enough for the project success.